CHICAGO -- There's an old saying in many parts of this country, including Chicago. "If you don't like the weather, wait a minute."

The Cubs waited a couple minutes too long to get their tarp into place Tuesday night, and it cost the Giants a chance at a comeback. The game was called after the top of the fifth -- and a four-hour, 36-minute delay -- because the infield was deemed unplayable.

The Giants are protesting the 2-0 result, but Cubs executives believe they handled the situation correctly.

"I don't think anyone takes any particular pride in winning a 2-0 game in five innings in a situation like that," Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer told local reporters, according to MLB.com. "Those are the rules, but as an organization, we made a very good-faith effort to try to play this game ... If we felt like it was going to dry tonight, we'd still be waiting. Ultimately we got to the point where we realized that this is not going to dry.

"I don't think anyone is at fault. It was a flash storm. As you know, (the White Sox) didn't get any rain whatsoever. Really showed up on the radar really late and it was much harder than we thought. ... The volume of the storm was much harder than anyone expected, so the tarp probably started getting out on the field later than it usually does."

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Less than 10 miles away, the White Sox and Orioles were able to finish their game without incident. It didn't rain over there, but it poured at Wrigley for about 15 minutes. Hoyer defended his grounds crew.

"Those guys do an incredible job," he said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "Our grounds crew is fantastic, and in Chicago there are so many storms that pull us off so often that it's a rare thing to happen. It was a bad confluence of events that led to that."

Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein also spoke to reporters and said the team tried hard to find a solution Tuesday night.

"Honestly we tried every way possible to the sake of fairness and equity to get to a suspended game and allow the teams to get to the point of a suspended game and allow the teams to play nine tomorrow, but the rules just don't provide for that," Epstein said, according to MLB.com. "We had both teams, the umpires and MLB wanting to do the right thing."

Both sides believed that the footing on the infield was going to be an issue, and Cubs manager Rick Renteria examined the field three separate times. Bruce Bochy did the same. Renteria said the dirt never got "significantly better."

The field was so wrecked that the Cubs grounds crew was still working on it Wednesday afternoon. As Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner ran sprints in the outfield at 2:30 p.m., several groundskeepers raked the dirt on the left side of the infield and worked on the edges between the infield and outfield.

The Cubs invited ticketholders from Tuesday's game to trade those used tickets in for complimentary tickets to a weeknight game at Wrigley Field later this season.